Laura Jokes
by KR Blake
Summary: In which Ross tells Laura jokes just to please her (and for his own hidden selfish reasons). Raura. One-shot. For Mary.


_Laura Jokes _

* * *

**For Mary, who is too persuasive for her own good. **

* * *

He liked the sound of her laugh. It was a tinkling sort of noise that always managed to make him laugh as well. He liked it—loved it, even. He thought it was beautiful.

And, what was even more beautiful, he figured out, was how easy it was to hear that laugh that always accompanied her easy, bright smile and shining eyes. It had taken him a few days to recognize the patter, but he noticed it. He noticed the kinds of jokes she would laugh at the hardest.

She didn't like the stereotypical race jokes, or the Yo Mamma jokes—to her, those jokes were horrible. They weren't even considered jokes.

No, she liked the innocent kind of jokes. The ones that you would normally tell kindergarteners. A pun, one-liners, riddles—anything like that. She loved them. They were to her as YouTube videos of guys getting kicked in the crotch were to him (fricken hilarious, to say the least).

And once he had figured that out, he used it. Because, really, what was the harm in intentionally making her laugh, if it made him happy, as well?

/-/-/-/

They sit beside each other in the weekly table read, like always. It wasn't their scene yet, though; right then was a heated argument between Trish and Dez over some miniscule detail on Dez's latest music video. Dez wanted to make it perfect, but Trish was arguing that it didn't have to be perfect; it just had to be up on the Austin Moon website that night.

"_No!_" Calum shouted across the table in frustration, in character. "_That. Is. Not. My. VISION!_" he spaced out his words to enunciate them.

Laura followed along dutifully, waiting for her mark to intervene. Ross, however, was busy scrawling something on the corner of his script.

"Psst! Laura!" he hissed under his breath when he finished. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and gave him an odd look as he slid his script over to her. She read his neat handwriting.

"_What do you call a fake noodle?_"

She felt a smile begin to crack across her face, and she tried to hide it behind her hair. "_What?_" she mouthed to him through her bangs. He wrote the answer quickly beneath the question, grinning widely as she read it.

"_An imPASTA!_"

She tried to hide the laughter that bubbled up in her throat, but she couldn't. A small squeak escaped her mouth, and she slapped her hand over her mouth in surprise. A few people looked up, but no one seemed to notice too much. She cleared her throat silently. No laughing. Not when people were talking. That was rude.

But as she glanced at Ross sideways, she couldn't help it. The laugh came out. It was just a beat, but it was enough to make him burst out into laughter, throwing his blonde head back, his entire body shaking.

She tried to fight back the laughs, but it was impossible—no matter how many "_shush!_"s they got, she couldn't stop laughing.

How did he know how to make her laugh like this?

/-/-/-/

Laura sat in her dressing room, eating her lunch and reading a book at the same time. Today the book was _Divergent_. She was so engrossed in the story that she didn't hear him come in, or plop down in the couch across from where she was curled up in the overstuffed armchair, book in her lap and GoGurt in her mouth. She only registered his presence when he threw a pencil at her playfully. She rolled her eyes and shut the book with a swing of her hand.

"What do you call a cow with no legs?" he said immediately, grinning, not wasting time with pleasantries.

"What?" she said, though her mouth was so full of the GoGurt that it had come out distorted, sounding like, "_Gwhat?_"

His grin grew as he anticipated her reaction—the one he wanted. "Ground beef." He answered.

She nearly began choking on her GoGurt. Some of it had slipped out of her mouth and travelled down her chin as she laughed, but she hadn't noticed. The book had even slid out of her lap, and she hadn't paid any mind to it. She was laughing too hard, tears forming in the corners of her eyes as she threw her head back over the arm of the chair.

She looked beautiful, he noted as he laughed just as hard as she did over the senseless joke, when she laughed.

/-/-/-/

The jokes had become a daily occurrence by now; he had a new one for her every day. He would tell them to her at any point during the day—whether it was when they were hanging out in Calum's dressing room, or when they walked through the parking lot to their parents' waiting cars during the day. He always had one, and he always told it to her.

"_Why don't seagulls fly by the bay? Because then they'd be bagels._"

"_How do you get Pikachu on the bus? You poke 'em on._"

"_What did the guitar say to the guitarist? Pick on someone your own size!_"

His favourite times to tell her the jokes—the Laura Jokes, he'd decided they were, as they only fit her—were when they were alone.

Because then there would be no one around to see him watch her as she laughed, no one to point out the admiration in his eyes.

And he'd prefer it if that stayed his own dirty little secret.

/-/-/-/

Ross didn't like to see her sad—no one did, of course, but he was a special case. He couldn't stand it. He couldn't tell why, but he knew he always wanted her smiling and happy. It was non-negotiable to him.

So when she had called him late at night, her voice mangled by tears, he didn't think twice about creeping downstairs and out the back door, still in his pajamas. He kept her on the phone, whispering soothingly that it was going to be okay, as he all but ran through LA towards her house, which, thankfully, wasn't far. He had tried to get the story out of her as he ran, but she wouldn't say—she couldn't, probably.

Finally, ten minutes later (though it had felt like an hour to him) he hauled himself over the fence around her backyard and whispered into the receiver for her to let him in. He heard the locks turning in on the other side of the door a second later, and the door slowly crack open. He sucked in a breath.

Her shoulders were slumped and her eyes, though barely visible in the nighttime, were clearly red-rimmed and puffy from crying.

His lips parted silently as he shut his phone and dropped it into the grass beside his foot, drawing her into a hug. She welcomed it, shutting the door behind her and burying her head into his chest. He felt her quiet tears wet his shirtfront, but he didn't mind. He simply swayed a little from side to side, whispering in her ear that she'd be alright—that whatever was making her cry wouldn't be permanent. He promised it.

"Hey, Laura?" he said after a few minutes of silence.

"Yeah?" she sniffled, pulling away from him a little to look up at his face.

"How do you wake up Lady GaGa?" he asked. She wiped away a tear as it fell down her already tear-stained cheek.

"How?" she asked.

"You poke her face."

And she smiled. It was tiny, fleeting, almost nonexistent, but he caught it before it vanished.

It was no laugh, but it was a start.

/-/-/-/

They sat on his bedroom floor, their math textbooks spread all around them in a circle as they studied—or, rather, as she studied and he pretended he wasn't watching her. Because that would be ridiculous. Why would he watch her? It's not like he laid awake at night, replaying her smile over and over again in his mind, or scoured the internet every morning during breakfast to find a new pun just so he could hear her laugh again.

Because, again, that would be ridiculous.

He grinned to himself as he wrote something in his binder where he should have been answering question two on page 279.

"Hey, did I get this one right?" he asked, turning his binder around to face her. A wide smile spread across her face as she read.

"_2 + 2 = Crazy 4 You._"

She rolled her eyes. "Do your work, Ross." She chided him, but she couldn't help laughing. He laughed along with her, but he couldn't stop that pang of sadness bloom in his chest.

She didn't notice it wasn't one of his Laura Jokes.

/-/-/-/

Patience. That's what he told himself. He needed to be patient with her. He tried to hint at her with his Laura Jokes; "_Why didn't the woman want to date the gardener? He was too rough around the hedges._" "_I met the woman of my dreams at the base of Mount Vesuvius. She is the lava my life._"

She didn't catch on, of course. She was too busy laughing at what she assumed to be jokes. And he was okay with that—for now. Her laughter was beautiful. He could wait, as long as he had that to hang on to: he could hear her laugh like that, and it was beautiful.

/-/-/-/

He couldn't decide what Laura tasted like. GoGurt? No, not quite. GoGurt tasted fruity, and she didn't. Salty? No, not even close. She was much sweeter than salt. So would it be sugar, then? No, sugar had that odd aftertaste, and she didn't.

He couldn't decide as he kissed her. It was daunting.

Pulling away from her, Ross leaned his forehead against hers and sighed, content. She looked like she was glowing, he noted, in the setting sun. She was seated in his lap, arms around his neck, as they sat on the roof of the filming studio. He'd brought her up here to tell her a joke, but as soon as she had turned to him and smiled that beautiful, bright smile of hers, he'd lost all his words. She had just looked so beautiful standing against the evening LA cityscape—the sun had been surrounding her like a halo, defining her as the angel he knew she was.

And… and he'd broken.

Patience be damned—he'd needed to have her. Right then. It wasn't an option; he knew that much.

And, really, who could blame him? She was special, one of a kind. Any guy would have been stupid to not have fallen for her ages ago.

And so he'd kissed her. Just like that. Like it was so simple. After all those weeks of thinking about her, her laugh, her smile, what their first kiss would be like (if it ever happened) and it was so simple.

And she'd kissed him back. Sure, she had frozen against him for a moment, but that was just from the sheer shock of the kiss. But then she'd melted into it, and kissed him back, and it was beautiful.

All those ran through Ross's head as he looked at her through his lowered eyelashes, smiling faintly. He couldn't help but feel proud of himself—her lips were a bit red, and her lip gloss was smudged at the corner. Because of him. Her hair was a bit tangled. Because of him. Because he'd tangled his fingers into it as he kissed her. She looked happy and kissed because of him.

"What're you thinking about?" she asked, her eyebrows crinkled a bit in confusion.

He smirked. "Where does the baseball player keep his lemonade?" he asked suddenly, catching her off guard.

She grinned. "Where?"

"In the pitcher." He said, and she laughed. He laughed along with her, hugging her closer and kissing her again, as she was still laughing.

It clicked then, in his mind, what she tasted like. It wasn't _one_ specific taste. It was a hodgepodge of so many different tastes that all added up to her.

She tasted like laughter.

She tasted like everything sweet in the world, and sunshine, and springtime, and everything that was good in his life. Warm fires on cold winter nights, and homemade chocolate chip cookies, fresh out of the oven.

It was everything he loved in the world, and it all added up to her, and her beautiful, wonderful, all-consuming taste of laughter.

* * *

**Eh, it's not my favourite, but my friends convinced me to write this. All of the jokes within this story were supplied by Mary, Kero, and Emily, so thank them for the jokes. I don't own "Divergent". Well, I do own a copy of it, but it as a series is owned by Veronica Roth, AKA writing perfection. **

**I'm still on my fanfiction break, by the way. But I was thinking... what if I started a new multichapter, but it was different from what I usually write? What if it's a supernatural/urban fantasy/sci-fi/whatever-the-hell-I-want-it-to-be story? Would you guys read it? Please tell me in the reviews! **

**-KR Blake **


End file.
